Topic: How to find first Lemons car?
Hello all,
I attended my first Lemons race last month at Barber Motorsports and have to say that I am hooked on the idea! I and my group of friends have no experience at Lemons cars, but one of us does have some stock car racing experience and used to have a team with that. We are now in the process of trying to get and prepare a Lemons car, realistically for Road Atlanta in December. I think it would probably be best for us to get a lower/medium performance car since none of us have any road experience, and most of us have never been been on the track before. I have read through the rule book regarding car construction, and find it very hard to come up with a car for $500. How in the world do you guys go about finding a car and have one running well for just $500? I was very impressed at how hard the cars were getting pushed at Barber, with very few of the cars seeming to have engine issues.
We have been doing a little car searching on craig's list and ebay around the Southeast with no luck. Any car that I see that runs, even an extremely old one is typically $750-1k. At the Lemons race at Barber it seemed like 1/3 of the field was BMWs. I just don't see how teams can get these cars in a good running state for $500. Any tips? Do you typically have to buy a car that is out of a junkyard with a non-running engine and just somehow cheaply rebuild it? Seems like to me an engine rebuild alone would be worth more than your $500 dollar allotment, much less the cost of also buying the non-running chassis.
After reading the rules I do see that you can sell things off of a car to reducts its value, ie buy a $750 car, sell $250 of interior and its a $500 car, but I don't see really how you can sell the interior of a 1986 Toyota for any sort of value, ha!
Any tips on finding and building our first car would be very much appreciated. I have a hard time seeing how we could get a "barely running" car for $500, much less one that you can push hard through a 14 hour race.